In recent years, more and more business transactions are being conducted over the Internet. In many cases, a transaction may involve the submission of data from a client device to a target server. A user at the client device may interact with a client-side application, for example, and the client application may be configured to transmit the data submitted or identified by the user to the target server, without necessarily requiring the user to know or to provide an address (such as a Uniform Resource Locator or URL) of the target server. In one example scenario, a taxpayer may provide tax-related data (e.g., by typing in some or all of the data, or by providing pointers to other sources such as locally stored files or investment web sites from which the tax data may be obtained) to a tax preparation software application installed at a client device such as a personal computer or laptop. The tax preparation software application may be configured to perform the necessary computations on the provided data, prepare one or more tax returns corresponding to the data, and submit the prepared tax return or returns to the appropriate targets (such as web servers maintained by one or more taxing jurisdictions) over a network from the client device.
The vendor of a client application may often have no control over the addresses of the target servers to which data is to be submitted from the client application. The address of a target may change from time to time, and the organization responsible for the target (such as a government agency) may be under no obligation to implement any automated redirection mechanisms to ensure that data transmitted to the original (unchanged) target address is reliably received at the changed target address. Such changes may at least potentially result in a failure when the client application submits the data. The address change may occur after the client application is installed at the client computer system, so that, for example, a target address of a tax authority that is hard-coded in a client-side tax preparation application may be rendered invalid for use by the time the taxpayer is ready to file one or more tax returns. If a data submission on behalf of a user fails, the user's confidence level in the client application may fall, and the likelihood of the user re-purchasing products from the vendor responsible for the client application may be lowered. In addition, in some cases, a failed data submission may require the user to redo a non-trivial amount of work (e.g., by re-entering data in a form) to accomplish the task being performed.